Chapter 165: Chapter 165: Home
*Runze’s POV*
The morning feels different.
Maybe because, for the first time in weeks, I know this room isn’t where I’ll fall asleep tonight.
The room looks exactly the same as it always has. The same white walls, the same faint antiseptic scent lingering in everything. And yet it already feels like somewhere I used to be rather than somewhere I am.
Mrs. Wen finished packing what little remained yesterday. There had never been much to pack anyway. The hospital gowns weren’t mine, most of what filled the small bag were Bael’s daily necessities, the extra shirts and personal items brought over during the long days he spent practically living here by my side.
Only two things remain on the bedside cabinet.
The black sketchbook. And the leather case holding my drafting pencils.
I reach for the sketchbook first, turning it over once in my hands before setting it back down. Its pages are no longer empty.
Somewhere between the long quiet days and the slower, heavier ones, they had filled themselves, almost without my noticing.
Unfinished floor plans, the suggestion of a roofline, a staircase I reconstructed from memory, then abandoned halfway through and started again differently. I had not set out to fill the pages.
Architecture had simply always been the thing my hands returned to when the rest of me didn’t know what to do with itself. Sketching gave time somewhere to go. Before I knew it, hours had passed and the light outside the window had changed color, and I had not once thought about anything I didn’t want to think about.
My thumb brushes lightly across the textured cover before I close it. The familiar weight settles comfortably into my hands.
The door clicks open.
I look up.
Bael steps inside.
He is wearing a simple black shirt, the collar open at the throat, dark trousers. No tie. No jacket. Just him, unhurried, the way he looks when he has decided the world can arrange itself around his schedule rather than the other way around. Dark hair, sharp jaw, that particular grey of his eyes that I still haven’t found the right word for... not cold, exactly, but precise, like they take in everything they land on.
They land on me now.
He crosses the room slowly, and I become very suddenly aware of what I must look like, standing here in the oversized grey sweater, my posture fragile and careful as I stay close to the bedside table where my sketchbook is waiting.
His gaze moves over me once, unhurried, tracking from my face downward and back up again, and something shifts almost imperceptibly in his expression. Almost. His tongue touches his lower lip briefly, a small unconscious thing, before he meets my eyes.
"Hmn." The sound is low, quiet. "You look better."
The heat that climbs my face is immediate and completely beyond my control.
"I feel better," I manage.
He reaches past me without another word and picks up the pencil case from the cabinet, tucking it and the sketchbook beneath one arm. Then he turns back and extends his free hand toward me, palm open.
"Let’s go."
I look at him, then down at the palm waiting patiently for mine. I reach out, lacing my fingers through his. The warmth of his skin is immediate.
He braces his weight as I take my first careful step away from the bedside table, and I loop my free arm through his almost without deciding to — just the body knowing what it needs before the mind catches up. We begin walking, and he adjusts his stride at once, shortening it until it matches mine exactly. Slow. Patient. Neither of us speaks about it.
I glance up at him as we near the door, and that is when I notice it, the faint color sitting high on the outer edge of his ear. A warmth that has nothing to do with the temperature of the room.
I look away before he can catch me looking.
In the corridor, the doctor is already waiting with two nurses beside him. He smiles when he sees me walking unassisted, the professional composure of the past weeks softening into something more genuine.
"Remarkable progress," he says simply. Then his expression settles back into something more measured. "Rest when you’re home. No overexertion. If anything changes, please contact me immediately."
His eyes flick briefly toward Bael, the silent warning expanding to cover both of us. "That instruction applies to the two of you equally."
Bael inclines his head, his posture shifting into a polite, respectful stance.
"I understand."
Two nurses bow politely, wishing us well as we pass. Further down the corridor, the security detail quietly falls into formation. Mrs. Wen had already returned to the estate ahead of us. Instead, the guards step quietly behind us. They don’t crowd us, keeping a respectful distance, but they move fluidly to clear the path.
The elevator doors slide open with a soft chime.
We step in and I watch the numbers descend above the door. Bael’s thumb moves across the back of my hand in a slow, repeated motion that I am not sure he is fully aware of.
The lobby arrives with a rush of noise and movement, doctors in white coats, families carrying bags, the automatic doors at the entrance swinging open and shut in a steady rhythm. After days inside a room where the loudest sound was a monitor, all of it lands at once.
I tighten my hold on Bael’s arm slightly. He doesn’t comment on it.
The main doors slide open.
I stop at the threshold.
Cool air meets my face — fresh and alive and entirely unlike the recycled stillness of the past weeks.
I close my eyes without meaning to and simply breathe. The morning carries the faint smell of rain-damp pavement and something green from somewhere I can’t locate, and the sun is not quite warm yet but present, pressing lightly against my closed eyelids.
When I open my eyes, Bael is looking down at me.
The smallest smile crosses his face. Not the careful, controlled version. The real one, the quieter one, that I have only recently learned to recognize.
"Let’s go home," he says.
I nod.
The car waits at the entrance, a guard already holding the rear door open. Bael guides me inside with one hand steady at my back, making sure I don’t move too quickly, and then follows and pulls the door shut behind him. The noise of the city cuts off cleanly. Silence settles around us like something physical.
The car moves.
I watch the city through the tinted window. Office workers moving in clusters at pedestrian crossings, a woman adjusting the hood of a child’s coat before the light changes, a delivery van double-parked with its hazard lights blinking. All of it ordinary, continuous, indifferent... a city that had not paused at any point during the weeks I spent suspended inside a single room, waiting to find out which direction my life would fall.
It is a strange thing to look at. Not painful, exactly, just strange.
Then —
Sunlight catches a windshield somewhere ahead of us and fractures across the glass.
A horn sounds from a cross street, sharp and sudden.
The squeal of brakes, somewhere close.
And the memory slams into my chest without warning, violent and vivid. The truck, the sudden, terrifying impact that shattered the glass, the impossible weight crushing the passenger side, trapping me in the darkness while the world spun out of control.
My breathing seizes, turning shallow and ragged. The scenery outside blurs together into a chaotic streak of motion.
No...
No—
Before the panic can fully take hold of my lungs, a solid warmth surrounds me.
Bael.
Without a word, he pulls me gently toward him, shifting his weight to tuck me into his side. One arm wraps securely around my shoulders, drawing me against him, while his other hand rests protectively across my back, holding me steady.
My forehead comes to rest against his chest. I don’t resist the movement. I press closer, burying my face against the soft fabric of his black shirt until the sound of his heartbeat becomes steady beneath my ear.
Slow. Even. Alive.
*Thump. Thump. Thump.*
His fingers move through my hair, a slow, repetitive motion.
"It’s okay," he says, barely above a breath. A pause, then quieter still: "I’m here."
I close my eyes.
The phantom sound of tires fades, the white noise recedes. What is left is only this — the rise and fall of his chest, the warmth surrounding me, the absolute, unreasonable certainty that I am not inside that car anymore, that I am not trapped, that I am being held by someone who has not let go of me since before I was even conscious enough to notice.
I stay exactly where I am until my breathing evens out.
By the time I lift my head, the city has changed outside the window. The dense geometry of the urban center has given way to wider roads, quieter intersections, taller trees lining both sides of the avenue. And then —
The stone walls of the Wuchen estate appear at the end of the driveway. Pale and solid and familiar. The iron gates begin to move, swinging inward slowly, gracefully, as though they already know us.
The car rolls forward, the tires cross the threshold.
Behind us, quietly, the gates close.
I exhale.
The weight I’d been carrying since the day of the accident loosened, just a little.
Home. Finally.
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